I'll reclassify "anger or outrage" as "reaction" then... in any form. This "mockery from the internet" is some pretty great publicity (bad or not). My point--the one that you didn't comment on--is that this reaction may very well increase their sales. We don't know how much they've been selling or how many customers have taken them up on the refund. This very well may be a home run investment for some of the VC partners (it also might not be).

I think most people are missing the point on this whole saga. Who cares if you think the product is dumb? If the product is selling, it has demand within it's target audience and that's great for the company and its investors. We don't know the company's sales so we can't really evaluate. If the company's customers are dissatisfied with the product, they can now get a full refund--if refunds don't start pouring in then cool. If you are mad that some people might find utility in the product (admittedly an overpriced product) then all of this outrage seems misguided.

Yes, fair to a degree, but we've found that a currency that isn't a commodity tends to work out best. Gold isn't a commodity currency anymore, it is simply a commodity. We would exchange our gold into fiat money before making a transaction (USD is currency, gold is commodity). Bitcoin aims to do that differently and the implications of that are not just semantic differentiation.

As a caveat, I have heard some rumblings of fractional reserve Bitcoin banking that could lessen the impact of the supply cap, but honestly I have no idea how that would work on the blockchain.

I own both BTC and ETH for many of the reasons you mention. 1) I'm young enough to take on the risk, especially in a diversified portfolio, 2) the upside optionality is ridiculous (and fun), 3) we're probably in the midst of a second bubble on the back of a resurgence of media attention and increased access for the general public.

I'm completely on board with the valuation of BTC being tied to the marginal cost of having the opportunity to have a place on the ledger.

It becomes a bit trickier for me when deciding if it is a currency or an asset. We universally do not use commodity money anymore. We use fiat currency and for good reason. Bitcoin is commodity money with limited supply. I haven't heard a good argument against the inevitable deflationary spiral because of those properties.

We'll augment our workflow using robots. We will continue to find edge cases where humans in the loop are needed and we'll move human capital to that task. Just as the shift from manufacturing to service occurred, we'll likely have a shift from service to maintenance or something like that.

I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here but I think the fact that the increases are so obviously correlated with the increase in carbon emissions that had been made by humans means that we can project forward based on other indicators. We don't have those same predictive indicators for the history of the planet.

It's not. Reddit is covering this way more than any other news source, likely because people don't understand that this isn't that big of a deal. Is it still newsworthy and demanding of some sort of reform or steps toward a reform? Yeah, sure, I guess. But the fact that this a "huge leak" with the buzzwords of "offshore" and "elite" make it an easy freakout for Reddit.